Google announced Tuesday that it will officially roll out Android’s Privacy Sandbox Beta to eligible mobile devices running Android 13.
“Privacy Sandbox Beta offers new APIs designed around privacy and uses no identifiers that can track user activity across apps and websites,” said the search and advertising giant. . “Apps that choose to participate in the beta can use these APIs to display relevant ads and measure their effectiveness.”
Devices selected for beta testing include[設定]inside[プライバシー サンドボックス]It has a section that allows users to control their participation, view and manage their top interests as determined by the Topics API to serve relevant ads.
According to Google, the initial topic taxonomy is set to include hundreds to thousands of topics, which will be hand-picked to exclude sensitive topics.
Beta testing will begin with a “small percentage” of Android 13 devices and will gradually expand over time.
The Android Privacy Sandbox is Google’s response to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT). ATT requires an app developer to seek a user’s explicit consent before using a unique identifier to track a user’s online behavior across the app and her website. Introduced by Apple in iOS 14.5.
This experiment is part of a broader web initiative aimed at phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome web browsers by 2024.
The technology that underpins our ability to gather our users’ evolving interests is a machine learning technique called federated learning, which decouples “the ability to perform machine learning from the need to store data in the cloud.”
This allows distributed edge devices such as smartphones to effectively learn a shared predictive model while keeping all training data on the device, allowing websites to access information about consumers without violating user privacy. You can access it.
Android devices are now assigned a unique, user-resettable identifier that app developers can use to track their online behavior. Privacy Sandbox replaces identifiers with a suite of privacy-preserving tools designed to limit information sharing while supporting personalized advertising.
Google’s proposal hopes to strike a balance between interest-based advertising and privacy, but the company criticizes that Apple’s “frank approach” doesn’t offer a viable alternative.
That said, Apple’s ATT faces its own criticisms. In September 2021, Lockdown Privacy called Apple’s policy “functionally useless to stop third-party tracking” and said it “made no difference to the total number of active third-party trackers.” rice field.
Additionally, according to a December 2021 Financial Times report, apps continue to track users on iOS, albeit in an anonymized and aggregated manner, similar to Google’s privacy sandbox.
